When it generally comes to racism/prejudice, I generally put survival instinct before aggression. I know it's the natural tendency to automatically go to burning torches and lynch mobs forming on sight given the melodramatic Gothic stereotype, but there's really a lot more to prejudice and discrimination than the overt "HEY DEMIHUMAN, WE DON'T TAKE KINDLY TO YER TYPE AROUND 'ERE!"
In the realm of dread, your average peasants are oppressed, steep in fear of the unknown, and often unable to deal with the unnatural threats around them. If they could, then you wouldn't need player characters.
Hell_Born wrote:
How strongly do you push this angle? Do you outright punish a player for wanting to be a non-human race?
No, punishing them would be passive aggressive if I let them play demihumans in the first place. There may be some consequences for it that rise up over the course of play. However, it's neither my purpose as a DM to arbitrarily make a player suffer for making a legitimate choice nor try to "teach them a lesson".
How does fantastic racism cross-align with alignment in your games? I'm presuming most of us are, in the face of Raveloft's very real "demihuman" monsters, going to go with the assumption that "fantastic racism is a moral failing that can serve as a foothold for evil, but it's not inherently evil, anymore than being an alcoholic or very sexually casual is evil", but I was morbidly curious to see if anyone out there would actually promote fantastic racism as being a good thing in the Demiplane of Dread.
I guess it depends on the type of racism you're talking about. If you're talking about shrieking, panicking, and running away, that's probably not evil. If you're talking about supporting an ideology that abstractly advocates eradication of any vague type of being or people that willfully consort with those beings, then yeah that's kinda evil. However, given the social context of a place like Tepest, it may be more of an evil that is on the institutional or cultural level. I doubt, that most Tepestani think about the full implications of what the Inquisition doctrine might mean most of the time.
Just how strong is its grip? Is there any hope for a non-human to win acceptance in at least some small community through proving its valor? I mean, I think I remember there being rules that heroic deeds can reduce a character's Outsider Rating for a given settlement, and the Lamplighter PrC in Gazetteer 3 also knocks 3 points off of your OR due to you being recognized as a member of Mordent's most heroic local group, but does anyone actually play their Ravenloft games under the assumption that "no, you're a filthy dwarf/elf/halfling/gnome and that means humans will hate and despise you forever no matter what you do"? You know, the Marvel approach to fantastic racism?
Generally it varies by social context. I usually play prejudice most of the time avoidance or perhaps giving information that leads unwanted people elsewhere. Basically, subtly nudging outsiders to go elsewhere. If a strange encroaches on somebody's territory, you might get an instinctive show of force in an attempt to motivate the intruder to find easier victims elsewhere. Fleeing in fear or crying for help might also be a response.
Hostility and aggression will usually come from some sort of background instigation, whether situational or cultural. If there's a cultural hatred, such as the Vistani for the Barovians, then the prejudiced will usually wait for superior numbers or if egged on by intoxication or other inhibition lowering factors. Suspicion for things that go wrong is another context for when direct action might be taken.
Ultimately, i try to take into consideration that the environment is different from ours. It's a place where a peasant can get punished badly for making bad comments about a noble or other person of power. They don't have our protections from violence and outright insulting somebody holds graver weight than in modern times. Similarly, lynch mobs can't magically form from nothing at an instant because people live over dispersed areas without modern forms of communication.
Going off on a tangent, I've been wondering about this for hours, since I finally scored a copy of the VRG to Walking Dead: what would the Weathermay Twins do if they investigated stories of a "wolf-knight", a werewolf that is reported actually saving people, and found that he's no werewolf, but a very rare outlander; a Lupin, a member of a race of goodly-aligned anthropomorphic wolves. More than that, he's a Lupin paladin, still dedicated to upholding both his oath as a paladin and his people's centuries-old oath to hunt and slay werebeasts. How do folks think they'd take it, especially if he passes every anti-werewolf test they can think of?
I think the Weathermay-Twins, as the heirs to Van Richten's legacy and able to learn a bit from his past mistakes, would not condemn him. They're scholars and fairly enlightened. Given enough (perhaps exceptional?) circumstances, I think even George Weathermay might understand to a limited degree, although trust may never be great.
Finally, coming at this from the other side of the fence... in the face of the fantastic racism arrayed against them, how much leeway do you rule humanoids (or demihumans or whatever other term you wanna use for playable races) have to defend themselves against human bigotry, prejudice and intolerance? Hell, do you even allow demihumans to use force to protect themselves from racist assailants, or is that an immediate Powers Check?
Self-defense in and of itself is not grounds for powers checks.
Say you have a scenario where the Mists spit out an Outlander party of goodly aligned adventurers with at least some demihumans somewhere in Tepest. Lost and confused, they wander into a nearby village looking for supplies. Naturally, everybody starts freaking out, especially because there's an Inquisitor of a particularly firebrand sort of nature in town. Realizing the locals aren't friendly, the party promptly moves to leave the place... not quick enough, because now there's a mob after them. They try to dissuade their attacks verbally, shouting assurances of non-hostility, then, when the assailants keep coming, trying to use non-lethal options to repel them (tanglefoot bags, fear spells, etc). Only when they keep coming despite that does the party kill the Inquisitor with a ranged attack and use the confusion to flee.
Would you consider the party evil in this scenario?
No, absolutely not, both from an in-game perspective and an out-of-game perspective. Out of game, it would be me as a DM setting them up. In-game, they may have gone above and beyond what can be expected. Of course, the townspeople may not believe it that way.